Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Conference Board and today's webcast, Four ways to turn Skills into your competitive Edge. My name is Erin Betty. I'm a Senior fellow at the in the Human Capital Center of the of the Conference Board. I'm really excited to be moderating the session today. I'm joining you from sunny Lexington, KY. So just in terms of the agenda today, our speakers are going to discuss three main areas, but of course we will, you know, we'll adjust based on your needs, discovering at least four key approaches to incorporating a skills based strategy across your HR practices and then exploring a new framework to guide you on your journey to becoming skills based. And I'm really excited that we're going to be presenting, I think some some insightful research that that will help you in that, in that journey as well. And then the the last part, we're just learning about some of the latest technologies that are always changing and that are supporting this skills integration. So we are going to be doing a poll to kind of see where you are on this process. And please don't forget to put your questions in the chat. All right, so I'm excited to present our 2 speakers today. Freddie Mitchell, who's the Associate Partner of Talent Transformation at IBM. Welcome. And Catherine Gilbert, she's a research scientist at SAP. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our speakers, introduce themselves and tell you more about their organization. And we're going to have a really, I think, an engaging discussion this morning over to you. Thank you so much, Freddie. Maybe if you just want to share a little bit more about yourself and then I'll, I'll take us into the research content. Sure, we'll do, Catherine. Hi everyone. Freddie Mitchell with IBM. I'm in the Atlanta area. I've been in the skills and learning space for 20 plus years and seen lots of changes over the years, especially especially these last 18 months. I would say I'm really excited to join Catherine and Ren on the today's webcast. So happy to be here. Thanks so much, Freddie. Yeah, and welcome everyone. We're, we're thrilled to have this session with you. Just as Arun was saying, please do feel free to engage with us live through the chat. We'd love to address and get to some of your questions throughout as well as at the end of today's session. A little bit about me. So I do work for SAP SuccessFactors within our research division. I have a PhD in IO psychology. And so that's really the background that I bring to bear is the psychology of business. And I specialized in researching on artificial intelligence and the adoption and trust of AI within workplaces for my PhD. So I think we'll, we'll have some time to cover off on some of the exciting ways that AI is really starting to be integrated into this this skills topic and starting to help folks really realize some of that potential that's been much talked about within this domain. So with that being said, what I'm going to to be going through with you is just really a very high level research summary from my team's work on this skills topic over the years. And so we're going to spend just a little bit of time here, a couple of minutes getting some foundational research background so that we can have. Kind of a. Shared baseline to dive into the discussion for the rest of today. So what you see depicted on the screen here is actually my team's five years of research on this subject. And you can see in this progression all the way from 2020 that skills has been consistently topping the charts as a key research trend. So every year our team does this meta trends analysis and we look at all the other trends reporting that's happening in the marketplace and we synthesize those key overall trends. And so every single year Skills is showing up as either a number one trend or a #2 trend. So absolutely dominant within within the broader HR discourse. And you can see two in 2024. This is our most recent reporting of this. This is published back in February. And Skills was number 2 as a trend, number one was AI. So Skills was truly neck and neck with the amount of discourse that was on AI. So I think that really paints the picture for all of us that this is an enduring trend and absolutely a trend that we we can't get away from. And there's many reasons for that that we'll we'll discuss throughout today. So in our our team's most recent study of this topic, which was published this year. So this is very recent research. Really what we heard from HR was these 4 pain points, these four challenge areas when it comes to approaching this topic of skills and making it reality. And so I know many folks in the audience might relate to some of these challenges. So hopefully this resonates with you and maybe what you've experienced. So the first challenge is that traditional competency models are quite fixed in time, quite static, and they can become outdated quite quickly as well. And so there's a bit of that push pull of, you know, why should I invest in this competency modelling when so rapidly it falls out of out of vogue? I'm seeing a comment that folks are not seeing the slides. Can I just confirm whether the slides are visible? Thanks, Steph. Appreciate that. I'll, I'll just keep kind of speaking to the research and hopefully the slides are able to pop up as we go or Steph, let me know if we should transition who's clicking through them. Second key challenge and appreciate you Sandra, for for pinpointing that for us. Second challenge is that assessing skills is quite labor intensive. It can be subjective and it can also be inconsistent. So when we think of all these different functions across the business, how can we accurately capture skills? That's certainly a challenge that organizations are trying to combat, but I don't think there's a perfect answer in that front either. Third perfect. Thanks, Steph. Third, third challenge that we heard reported was scoffs off skills as we know are becoming increasingly important. So the need to really dive into all of these relational aspects of the skills that employees bring to the table is coming to the forefront. And so how do we actually assess and develop skills that? Are on the softer side of things and less you know, maybe clear cut and technical. And then last one is that employees have little incentive to actually maintain their own skills profile. So there's a real challenge here with motivation, we think from a psychological angle around how can employees get on board and find this intrinsically exciting and, and something that they want to engage with. There is, you know, maybe a bit of that fun aspect that's missing as well. So hearing this employee challenge around how can folks actually be incentivized to engage with maintaining and updating their own skills profile? So again, hopefully, I'd be curious to hear if any of those resonate with you. Often when we share these challenges, there's a lot of a lot of kind of familiarity with having experienced these challenges before. So we also looked at different personas within our research around what are HR is looking leaders looking for when it comes to skills data. And this is what we heard as kind of the top interest in capturing and using that skills data. So the most prominent of those was matching people to opportunities, workforce planning and then developing members of the organization and the list goes on. So really a lot of interest from HR leaders in different ways that skills commute, leverage. And these were also some of the outcomes that were highlighted from becoming more skills based. So more of a diverse set here of outcomes, specifically manager visibility and accountability into the skills base of their talent pool, employee autonomy and clarity, more fairness and transparency, more efficient HR practices, expanding the talent pool. So that talent pool piece has been in the works, especially the past couple of years, thinking about really what are those minimum requirements for someone to fill a role and then also having increased understanding of the workforce. So a lot of, you know, interesting positive outcomes that could be achieved by moving into skills based work. We also asked folks about their perceptions of the role of AI. And so really what we see here is some strong agreement between employee perceptions around AI technology for skills based decision making and manager perceptions of that technology. So 64% of employees reporting that they do think that there would be value in using AI for skills based decision making and 70% of managers agreeing. We also see reflected within these two personas of employees and managers some similarity in terms of the challenges they'd be looking to solve as it pertains to skills. So employees saying they'd like to know what skills they need to learn to be paid more. So really what is that tangible way that they could increase their own compensation because of skills that they've acquired, understanding the skills they need to get the next job that they're looking to have? And then also how are there, you know, kind of visibility into opportunities to learn and. Improve. Their current skill set, and again we see that mirrored quite closely in the manager results here. So similarly, managers are looking to understand the talent base of their employees, really where their team members sit with skills, what skills their team could learn that would be useful or that they could learn quite easily, and then also identifying opportunities to learn or improve the current skills of their teammates. So really, I think summarizing this slide overall, what we're seeing is a lot of similarity across the employee and manager profile. That's not always the case in research. Sometimes we see clear differences in those personas, but we're actually seeing incredible alignment both in terms of how these populations are thinking about AI and also the challenges to solve. Additionally, we took a look at what might motivate employees to actually share their skills data. So I was speaking about that a bit earlier, this challenge around intrinsic motivation. And so we saw three key pieces emerge here where employees would be more motivated to use and share that data if it matched them to relevant opportunities, inform their career development, and that actually helped improve their teamwork. So interesting. They're a bit of a a team oriented collective mentality. Additionally, employees said that if they knew that their organization was making decisions based only on their skills, they would be more motivated to improve their current skills, learn new skills, perform better at their job, and actually have a better employee experience. So kind of knowledge of what the organization is seeking to do with skills played an interesting role there too. So we're getting really to the heart of our research here in the last couple of slides. So what I really want to draw your attention to is we've contrasted current state versus desired state. For. Organizations. So we did this, you know, with our mixed methods research speaking to global HR leaders and what you see in the Gray there is where organizations say they are today. So current state reporting and what we see is that there's really like a 5050 split roughly where a lot of organizations are quite low maturity on skills and then some are moving towards the integration of some skills based practices. But what you'll note is that no organizations we spoke to say that they are fully skills based today, which means, you know, really weaving skills into all of their talent practices. Interestingly as well, in the blue is where that desired end state is. And So what we see is organizations are generally reporting they would like to move to a skills included framework. Some are saying they'd like to go fully skills based, so really have skills integrated across practices, but that's not the majority. So this was a really interesting realization for us is that having a fully skills based approach isn't always the end. Goal. It isn't always the desired end state and most organizations may actually be shooting for that mid level of skills inclusion. This was further bolstered when we spoke to employees and managers and we heard that really folks would feel comfortable with about 70% of talent decisions being made based on skills, but it's not the case that folks are looking for 100% of decisions to have a skills impetus. So there really is more of a a mixed bag here where overall employees and managers feel like the majority of decisions could be based on skills. But we don't need to shoot for that 100. Percent skills based approach. So what I'd like to share with you here, this is actually going to inform our poll as well. So take, you know, a bit of notes as we transition shortly into the pool too. This is the the framework that we ultimately landed on within our research. And these are the four different skills states that we suggest organizations can find themselves into today. So it really does progress from lower maturity on the left hand side to higher maturity on the right hand side. But before I go into what each of those states are, I again want to stress that it doesn't have to be that skills base is the ultimate goal. This is something where you can evaluate and triage. Where is my organization today? But then you can also choose where you want to go tomorrow. It doesn't need to be a linear progression towards, you know, ultimately being skills based. It's completely acceptable if today you feel your skills included and in five years you'd love to be skills LED. There doesn't need to be that fully skills based approach. So just a bit of a caveat there. When we look at what these states really are, skills implied work is organized around. Jobs. So the traditional way of thinking about work as different job descriptions, job titles and quite fixed in that job mentality. Organizations also will not be making decisions based on skills, but there could be kind of an implied approach to evaluating skills. So this could be something like looking at someone's CV and seeing their education and prior experience and implying that they most likely have a certain set of skills because they've done this in the past. So really, you can think of this implied state as a much more traditional hiring approach that deemphasizes skills. Skills included is looking at a state where certain primarily technical skills are starting to be assessed and woven in at various points in the hiring process. But that being said, work is still very much oriented around jobs. So still that framework of thinking of work as distinct and discrete jobs, then we move to skills LED. So this is kind of where the switch starts to flip a little bit and now work is starting to be organized around jobs, but connected to a really more diverse and robust framework of skills. And so getting more granular here about both technical, professional and soft skills and having that much more developed in a way that is robust and can then tie very specifically. To jobs. Lastly, our final state here, we have the skills based approach and this is where now work is organized entirely around skills and organizations will be making the vast majority of their decisions based on skills evaluations and demonstrations of skill capabilities. So, yeah, so kind of an interesting maturity curve, I would encourage you to start to reflect where you find yourself today on this. And then what I've highlighted here as well is some tools and technologies that can enable these different states within the organization. And you can see these kind of layer and build upon each other. So skills included, we have the beginnings of something like a skills taxonomy, some competency library work, some technical skills assessment and then that becomes more fleshed out in the skills LED aspect. And then finally skills based, you see AI being called out quite a bit there. So AI based skills ontologies work sample or portfolio demonstrations, skill inferencing. So AI actually making the inference of if you have this skill set, you know, what else might you be able to acquire as adjacent skills and AI driven recommendations as well. This can also be a helpful bit of a diagnostic for you to start to look at, OK, what are the existing tools and technologies we have at our organization and that can help you kind of place yourself on the framework as well. And then these were some more success factor specific capabilities that we have today, but I think we'll we'll keep this section relatively light in the interest of our pool. So with that being said, that takes us through our introductory research content and we can now jump into the pool and then into our moderated discussion. I do encourage you, if you're interested to take advantage of this QR code here. It links to the much more detailed full research reporting. So what I've shared with you is truly the highlights, the kind of lightest level of content. And there's so much more that we've included within that full report. So please do take a look. And my team, the growth and insights team, also does extensive future work research. So that's that second QR code. If you'd like to read up on some of our other topics as well, we have recent work on employees, employee potential people managers and then beginning of next year, our trends reporting will be coming up as well. So please do take a look. So with that being said, we're going to give a couple of minutes here to basically evaluate where you are today on this skills based practices journey. So take a minute or two here and think back to that progression. So we have skills implied on the left, skills based on the right. Where would you say that you fall today? So we'll just, we'll pause. Here, and I'll be very curious to see these results and see whether they kind of map on to what our larger research reporting found or whether we have a bit of a different distribution within this crowd. So just give you a minute. There to to fill that out. Just as a reminder, Catherine, they just have to click on one of the one of the letters, right? Yeah, I believe that's how it should show up is. Yeah, just select one. A lot of folks just thinking through this right now, Catherine, We've got at least half of them. Yeah, that's perfect. I'll, I'll move in just this or it's that distinction typically between the middle 2, right, The skills included and the skills LED can be a little tricky to position yourself. OK, so we have over 50. Percent as they're waiting, can we just, can you remind us? Like what's the difference between A&B again? Yeah, absolutely. So to help you folks with some of that decision skills included is essentially you're starting to assess a couple of skills, typically more technical skills and your skills taxonomy is not very robust. It's really just kind of dipping a toe into the the assessment and integration of skills. When we get into skills LED, work is still arranged around jobs, but your skills taxonomy is a lot more robust. So there's really a good understanding of the whole suite of skills people in your organization might need from technical, professional, soft skills, etcetera. And in skills LED as well, you may be having a little bit more integration of AI. So maybe not a fully developed use of different AI capabilities, but there could be the kind of beginnings of leveraging AI for understanding your your skills or assessing your skills. So yeah, those would be kind of the distinctions. And then skills based, I'll be curious if anyone reports being skills based. Let's take a look. Interesting. OK folks. So not too surprising here. We're seeing a pretty similar graph just turned on its side from what we reported in the larger research reporting. So essentially we see about 1/3 of folks today are in that skills implied stage, which is really more of a traditional setup. You know, maybe you're thinking about embarking on a skills journey, but you haven't been able to make that a reality quite yet. Skills included is the bulk of folks today, so the majority are assessing certain skills, maybe more technical skills. And then we do also have a couple folks reporting being skills LED. So that's interesting to see there is some of that greater maturity of a more robust skills taxonomy, really fulsome set of analysis and then nobody is skills based. So not overly surprising. That's what we saw reflected in our research as well. Thanks for participating in that folks. That's fun have gone too far. So I think we can switch now to our discussion. Arun, I'd love to hear some of the questions we have to discuss. Absolutely, Catherine, thank you so much. And we have Freddie here as well. So it would be great to have this conversation. I mean, given where I see where we've seen folks Catherine and Freddie, I mean, I would love to just start off with a very fundamental question around, you know, you've mentioned a little bit about what is included, but maybe just remind us again, when we talk about skills based, are we talking about, you know, you mentioned professional skills, but there's also hard and soft skills. What's the what? What's what's the general rule of thumb on what's what's in and what's out? Interesting, Freddie, I'll give a floor to you to kick us off. Yeah, Arin. So when you say in or out meaning the number of skills or what types of skills is that kind? Of I think types, yeah, the types of skills. And then I guess the follow up question would be how do you, how do we use AI potentially to validate those skills that are being entered? Like make sure we clean up the the, you know, clean up the, the, the list. Right. I think this what's included in skills is important and I think Catherine mentioned that on the skills included in skills, I'm going to get it messed up. Lead is definitely there of course, but I've been the skills base is a fundamental where we have a set number of our taxonomy of skills that we think should align based on competencies for a particular job. And usually you want a good mixture of the technical skills, but also the professional skills and soft skills, which I saw someone in the chat noted as power skills, which I completely agree. Great call out. And so those typically would be where we align to the job and to be comprehensive, we typically want anywhere from 12 to 15 skills aligned to a job so that we can really see the holistic approach. You also then want to calibrate those skills kind of across jobs and job families so that you can see the progression of skills. Some skills get greater in proficiency, some fall off because they now need to take on leadership skills, but you have to sort of see that progression so that the framework you've created has some validation to it and it it actually has structure. So that's a good mix that we've seen. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, Oh yeah. Go ahead, Catherine, Sorry. No, no, not at all. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think it's what I'm seeing is an interesting contrast in this research program. But also more broadly is I think that a lot of folks that are wanting to get more skills integrated into their talent practices are needing to start somewhere maybe a little bit more technical, right? Like that feels like the lower hanging fruit is what, you know, skills that we can, they're kind of narrow, we're able to validate them. They're within a population that is easy for us to validate as well. So that is kind of one stream that I see folks charging forward with is let's at least be working on that technical side of things. But then the contrast is, I think when we look at much of the discourse around AI is that there's this general sense of we need to hire people that are change ready and have that learning mindset. Like that's kind of been a thoroughfare across a lot of HR research. And so I think that's a, that's an interesting place where we find ourselves where, you know, these technical niches may be something we want to pursue soon and, and start to, you know, weave into our practices quickly. But on the flip side, there's this feeling that every single employee that we bring in needs to have a greater capacity for change, adaptability, positive learning orientation, etc. And so I would suggest that that's another way that folks who are looking to get more skills LED could, could pursue is, is there a way for us to assess and integrate that type of more mindset piece into our hiring and and talent? Practices. Yeah, I mean, I, I agree that there has to be a, a foundation right to, to to get things started. But Speaking of the foundation, how are you seeing like the some of the challenges being faced by companies that you know, obviously we all want to unlock potential using a skills based approach, but there's also some other side of this, which is there may be some now that you know, we have these skills, there may be some unmet expectations from the employee side. So what are some of the challenges that you're seeing with with with this approach from the research? Absolutely. I think there's a lot to speak to. I was noticing in our attendee chat someone mentioning they have this interest in moving towards skills LED, but to do so is going to be a monumental change management effort. So I think that's from the leadership perspective, from the HR perspective, that's really what we saw reflected in our research was that changing senior leadership and HR mindsets towards these type of efforts can be. As. Big if not bigger of a challenge than getting the tools and resources in place. So I think for many years this conversation has centered around, you know, we don't have the tools and resources that we need to make this happen, but the the change management piece is equal if not larger, especially today when some of those AI capabilities are a reality like they weren't before. The other piece I speak to. Is from the employee perspective, I think making this feel like a worthwhile investment of time from the employee side. And so that's, you know, what we saw reflected in the research is a lot of optimism about if this is something that we can make use of, employees are on board, they perform better, they're eager to upscale. But it really is like setting that understanding that this will be useful and valuable for them and not something where, for example, they just log in and they enter their skills and then nothing kind of comes of it. And they wonder, OK, you know, was that worth me taking the 5 minutes to update that? It's unclear. And then I think. The final piece on the employee side is also being able to. Kind of vet what employees are entering in. And so that's been an interesting conversation around self reported skills, of course, which is where a lot of tools are today. And I think there's there's certainly value there, but how can maybe AI play a role in validating some of those self report aspects? I think would be an interesting open question. But yeah, I think the IT really does like both sides of those, the leader side, the employee side, it does boil down in some ways to having people in the right frame of mind and orientation towards taking on. What? What really is? Quite a monumental change, so. Freddie, do you want to add to that commentary? Yeah, I would, I'd say, I'd think Catherine's spot on. I think the why is incredibly important. Why are we doing skills? And that has to be kind of at that center of change. I think we've also seen too, from the employee side, the transparency that it brings from a career mobility perspective, being able to put in skills, but see where that can open up the lab near the ladder model of career mobility. And now it becomes much more of a a honeycomb model where now I can really transition to different roles across the organization. Once I think employees can see that connection, it becomes much more motivating to keep their skills up to date and to make sure they're adding the next new skills that would be ready for their next role. Yeah. And I think Donna had a question around in the in the skills based organization that we talked about, you mentioned this, you know that work is organized around skills obviously, but can you provide some examples of what this looks like? Is there are other companies or is there a good example that you could just bring to life, bring this to life really, Because I think everybody's kind of eager to, to to get started. Absolutely. So I can, I can certainly speak to that a bit more in terms of how we envision it. Something to note though is we, we did this research and we were trying to find folks doing this and our results gave us 0 organizations that are in that state today. And so unfortunately, it's more of a like visioning of the future of of what this can and should look like, but a little bit less of, I can't point to a specific customer story, for example, because it's just not the reality. But who knows, maybe next year, maybe next year, we'll have one to share. So when we think about really what that state would look like is in an organization, you've actually now let go of things like job descriptions and job titles, and we start to see every employee as this very intricate combination of of all the skills they bring to bear. And what's powerful about this too is that it's not just the skills they have today, it's also looking at where they could be retrained and redeployed effectively based on that skills profile. And so things like looking for adjacent skills that they could be easily up skilled in. So, you know, I spent a lot of my time doing future work HR research and looking at, you know, the potential to need to reskill and up skill HR professionals. So we could imagine someone, let's say who's in TA and we look at their mix of skills and proficiencies. And then we see maybe they could actually with just a little bit of upskilling, be moved into a hybrid role where they do TA half of the time and then they also do sales half of the time. And so being able to kind of vision your talent pool very flexibly in that way is is how we would see this. There's other implications too that are interesting around compensation. So we think about once you imagine for all of us on this call, you let go of your job title, you let go of your job, you let go even of being on a fixed team. Now you kind of do project based work based on the need and you flux in terms of the team of. People you work with. How do you have the annual salary conversation? And so now there really could be this idea around different skills are what your compensation is tied to and different levels of proficiency of those skills are again really where your compensation. Sits. So it's a. It's a. Very different, much more flexible talent perspective and I think it would require a lot of open mindedness to to be living that today. But it is something from a future work perspective that we are speculating that may start to materialize in the near. Future potential? So. Yeah. And I would I would add to that Catherine, you know IBM did this journey to skills over six years ago. I wouldn't say we're completely skills based and I think we're continuing to evolve our skills. We do use skills quite a bit in our organization. We update it at least every six months. We update, you know, any resume or job description that we have and those kind of go hand in hand. It helps to match us 2 projects. And so those are all a part of our just normal working. And it also connects to learning. So learning can get served up to us based on our current skills and where they think we want to go. But we're not completely skills based. I would say that where where it's headed next is we can actually start to unlock doing strategic workforce planning 3, five years out based on skills and start to see what trends are coming and how we plan for that today versus being very reactionary. So that's something I think would probably be that future state vision that you talked about. And then the other piece is that they tied to the skills that you mentioned for employees and the the project base. Yes, that's a very open mindset for people to sort of get their hands around. But we have seen companies actually use this for stretch projects or gig type work, so that as certain employees want to think more of those project type roles or gig type roles, this does unlock a little bit of that where maybe you don't have to do it across the board, but you can start to socialize it to see how it plays at your organization. Yeah, it definitely opens up a whole new idea of the job structure. Such a great point. If I could just kind of double click on that, Freddie, this idea around proactive talent management, like I think that is, you know, in the interviews that I ran for this recent research reporting that was such a top of mind ask and need for HR is how can we actually get out ahead of these dynamic shifts in what we need in our labor force. And if there's that ability to forecast that with some degree of accuracy, I think it's just a huge unlock for folks to be able to. Yeah, really. And especially, you know. That all the all the like. Trends, so to say in terms of AI skills, right, the rise of the opt engineer and yeah, there will be many of those to come. So, yeah, I think there's there's huge, huge demand and interest from that lens. Yeah, agreed. We've got a question in the in the chat around, you know, just if we just sort of rewind and I apologize to Dietrich Thompson if I if I didn't get your question quite right. But if the sense that I'm getting is if we were just rewind to like what we know today, which is most of us put our skills on LinkedIn and you know, sometimes we, we, we, we, you know, we, we share that LinkedIn profile internally as well. How, how is this, you know, how is this different? And why should employees be more inclined to to participate in this skills based approach? I mean, I think you know, Catherine alluded to it earlier, it's connected to have what's the skills that I need to get paid more. LinkedIn is going to connect those skills to jobs that are potentially applicable to the skills that I have, right. And they're that's they're seeing that transparency of entering skills to the benefit to them personally. So I think at an organization, if they're putting in skills, there's an immediate reaction to, oh, this is going to harm me. This is going to be a constructive criticism about what skills I have versus an improvement toward my job growth or career mobility. So if they see the transparency that it's more self mobility driven, I think there could be some different approaches to that. But I think LinkedIn is all about what job is this going to open up for me if I put in my skills. Absolutely, I completely agree. As we start to kind of think about like next steps, what other advice or recommendations you have for the audience that could help them start on this journey or start thinking about the journey? Yeah, I, I will say I loved Kathryn's research because it's definitely what we've seen with our clients. I think many of our clients want to go from being much more skills implied and, and and jump immediately to them skills based in six months and that just doesn't happen. I think they also need to look at A1 size doesn't fit all across your organization. So some of our clients want to go with technology or the IT organizations to start there because it's a little bit more structured around skills and those skills are changing every 2 1/2 years. So there's real demand for using a skills based initiative within IT. So we can start there and learn a lot and then begin to scale. Other clients want to start in HR because they think that way at least we can own it ourselves and begin to understand it. So as we start to sell it to other functional groups, we at least have a handle on how HR can adapt to this. So I think that the idea is that not everyone's the same. Everyone needs to start where they are, figure out where they want to go and start with a small, you know, piece or small pilot and and learn and continue to grow from there. Absolutely. And I would, I would very much echo Freddy's points. I think that's absolutely spot on and I think that's. Often where I. See, you know, kind of that psychology lens of people having some fear and reservation around this topic is feeling that they need to overnight produce this super elaborate skills taxonomy that's going to be incredibly deep and accurate and stand the test of time. And I can completely relate and understand that if I, you know, felt I had a mandate to do that really rapidly, I would feel pretty overwhelmed and kind of instead maybe stall and think, I don't want to actually embark on this because it's just going to be such a monumental effort. And so exactly taking a bit of a like, you know, almost like a start up mentality of let's do this really constrained pilot and study it, you know, from a scientific lens and say, you know, let's put a little bit of resources here, see if there is that ROI. If there isn't, that doesn't mean that this is totally awash and we don't do anything skills based. Maybe it just means it's in a different functional? Area or for a different. Different ultimate application or different stage in the hiring process either. So, yeah, really I think that's a point I wanted to echo on today's call because I often deliver talks on this content. And what I hear time and time again from the audience is that people feel kind of nervous about their lack of maturity on the topic. And so I just want to reassure any folks that are having a bit of those sentiments, and maybe that's what drew you into today's call, that that is really the state that everyone else is into. And so the more that we can have candid sharing also between organizations about what's worked well and then learning and applying those pilots within your context, the better for everyone. So just kind of a a bit of a reassurance. Piece that. Having a lower maturity within skills based practices is completely on par with what we see globally and instead taking those those small steps towards integrating skills is the right. Place to start? These, these are great. These are great recommendations and advice, and obviously you're here. I think we lost. I'm ready to take that step. Where do they get help? Is it or is there a technology that they should look to? Is there, are there leading companies out there? Is there, is there a body of work in addition to what you've got that they can go to to start to, to get the help they need to to build this journey? Yeah, I would say I'll start Catherine, but love to hear your thoughts on this as well. I mean for IBM, it's, there's the other I think challenge with this is that the skills technology landscape is constantly changing. It's constantly being updated. New vendors are hitting the floor all the time with the new capabilities. And so it's important to take a step back. A lot of times what we do with clients to start is to spend time doing some visioning sessions and talk about where do they want to get to what are the big pain points we're trying to solve? And then how do we look at the value of those pain points if we were to solve them and to do some of those more valuable ones upfront so that we can kind of do the proof point, so to speak, and then figure out what technology would support those solutions and not kind of the other way around. I find that the some of the new the new folks on the market are very, you know, flashy and they have a lot of capabilities. It might be very tempting to go run and jump to a technology, but that isn't what we've seen as successful. Was successful is really developing a strong skill strategy out of the gate. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I think that's so true in terms of technology broadly as well as particularly in this moment in time, all the promise of these different AI vendors, right? Like, and so vetting instead of kind of being taken in by the, you know, latest and greatest interesting niche offerings, instead thinking, OK, what are, you know, the problems we have at hand and backing into solutions that are fit for purpose beyond. And I think to also just kind of adding, you know, reflecting on your, your comments there, Freddie, you could also use the framework who presented these 4 stages as a way to kind of evaluate and vet what makes sense. Because I could imagine a case where, you know, you hear some really exciting vendor pitch, but that offering that they have is actually really more. For a skills based. Approach and maybe today you are in that skills implied state. And so I think that could be potentially a bit of a an action coming out of today's session where you can always kind of go back to the different definitions of the framework and also the different technologies housed within each kind of level and say. And also I think that's another piece too when we think of this framework. Is that maybe your ambition for 2025 isn't even to progress from one state of the framework to the next, Maybe it's to really nail the part of the framework that you're in today. And so, so looking for tools and technology that bring you to a really fulsome sense of being skills based or skills LED or skills implied, etcetera. So I think that could be another bit of a diagnostic piece that would be valuable. Yeah, agreed. Even some clients I think that think their skills implied or maybe on the lower end of that skills implied scale. And so we have to help sure up even the skills implied kind of phase before we can jump to anything else. Yeah. Great point. Absolutely. Well, there's a lot to digest and we're excited about the journey. Would love to hear both of your final thoughts and any sort of, you know, call to action or next steps from each of you. Yeah, Freddy, feel free to go first. Yeah, I kind of already said it, but I mean, I, I think the call to action, I look captain's idea of the using the research sort of assess where you are, think about where you want to go, what are those pain points? And, and as I said, we, we help clients work through looking at that and creating that kind of final state vision. And what does the road map look like to get there? It's not in six months, but maybe it's in three years. And so how do we help you start at the right place and start with a structure where you can learn and scale and be able to adapt as you roll this out to the broader organization? Yeah, absolutely agree with all of that. And I think just to add from my perspective, so it was interesting being an IO psychologist and kind of the the lens that brings. And so really for us from that field of science, skills are incredibly valuable. They're robust, they're a way to have less bias in hiring and talent decisions. And I absolutely believe that they're the future. But when we take a look at the organizational context, there's so many other things at play that that do make this really a difficult nut to crack ultimately. And so, yeah, I would just encourage folks to continue leaning in on this topic, continue learning about, you know, what is available from a tech perspective, from an AI perspective, and start to put a little bit of your scientist researcher cap on yourself and think, you know, how could we start to pilot something within some of our processes and, and see where that ROI is landing and then, you know, think of expansion from there. But yeah, I think I do just want to stress that from, you know, the, the psychology science lens of things that I, I think skills absolutely have a place. And I personally am glad to see that that place is growing and expanding. And we, we just want to do what we can to support you folks with ideas as well as actual insights to move through that journey. So. Thank you, Catherine, and, and thank you, Freddie. I, I would say, you know, on behalf of the Conference Board and all the participants here, over 100 of us really appreciate your insights and it's been really a pleasure to, to, to share those thoughts with you. So thank you for being here. Our pleasure. Thank you so much and thanks everyone for attending. I loved, loved being able to do this session. Thank you everybody for attending and before we before we sign off, just want to again, thank you, the speakers for joining us. If you, and I'm sure you did enjoy today's session, please visit the Conference Board's website for a full roster of the upcoming web cast. And and also don't forget you have your own my TCB members only website offers members who created and personalized view. And I, I use this all the time to figure out what I'm, what I'm interested in as well. And you get a chance to access experts in one centralized place. 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